RE: [BIONT] Teleconference

[Kashyap, Vipul]

> Discuss Alan Ruttenberg’s use cases for BIORDF and identify relevant artifacts (thesauri, ontologies, mappings,     >  etc.).    Which use case you meant?  Or did I miss something?   [VK] The use cases I meant were created by Alan Ruttenberg and are available at the following locations on the HCLSIG Wiki        Let us know if you have any problems accessing them   http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/OMIM_Neural_diseases http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/Brain_Atlas_condition_to_scans  >  Brainstorm pragmatic and engineering definitions of ontologies in the context of the use cases identified above .   I started contemplating this question and it seems not as clearly as I think it would be.   If we give it a strict definition that an ontology is an RDF model with an <owl:Ontology> header, the Dublin Core wouldn't be an Ontology because "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" doesn't have an <owl:Ontology> header.  The ontology header appears to serve mostly for annotation purpose.  Although the range of "owl:imports" is constrained to owl:Ontology, but it is not clear from W3C's spec as what if the URI of an owl:imports is not an owl:Ontology.  If an ontology can owl:imports an "ontology" like DC without being labeled as some kind of error.  It implies that everything in RDF can be considered as an ontology.  Although this definition is at first seemingly absurd, there isn't a strong argument (at least I can not find one) to rule against it. It appears to me, intuitively, that an ontology is only an ontology when it is used by someonelse.  This relativeness seems in line with its "conceptual" definition like - a spec of conceptualization.  In other words, some assertion only becomes an ontology when its conceptualization is adopted by others.  But, how can we define it clearly in the engineer sense? Anyone has any ideas?   [VK] Will it be easier if you are able to look at the cases and simply enumerate the examples of thesauri, ontologies, information models, schemas that could be applicable for that use case?        At this stage, it may not be a good idea to get caught up in formatting and other details of whether something is an owl ontology or not…       Anyway, we could discuss these issues further in our teleconference tomorrow.   Cheers,   ---Vipul